10 things you should never do on a bank holiday weekend

Three glorious days off! Sounds like a dream doesn’t it? Until you start making plans, that is…

1. Plan to go to the bank
It’s all in the name, really.

2. Plan to go to the Post Office
Wouldn’t it be a bit too convenient if your local Post Office was actually open when you’re at home and would have time to go and –finally- send all those eBay orders / belated birthday postcards?

3. Go shopping
Oxford Street is enough of a nightmare on a regular weekend thank you very much.

4. Get your phone/laptop/Internet connection/water boiler fixed, or a haircut/manicure
If you find anybody who’s actually working on a bank holiday, chances are he/she is already triple-book. Give up on the idea of doing anything productive of your weekend, really.

5. Take a trip
Sure, travelling sounds like a dream in theory, but trust me, the prices and the crowds makes this idea more than debatable in practice. Just imagining the lines to pass security at Heathrow gives me chills.

6. Go to a slide and ice cream festival
Eating ice cream for lunch, going down slides and giggling all day is not what responsible grown-ups do on a bank holiday I’m afraid.

7. Organise an impromptu dinner party
Supermarkets’ opening hours are not going to be doing anything for you on that one… And how could you do without all those “essentials” Waitrose is famous for? #YESBriocheIsEssential

8. Clean your whole house
The first thing your colleagues will ask you on Tuesday morning is what you did on the weekend, and spring-cleaning is nowhere near as glamourous as the answer they’re expecting. You deserve better.

9. Have a picnic
Not that the weather is unpredictable in this lovely country of ours or anything… #WinterInAugust

10. Bake cake
Despite my advance notice (see #5), it’s very likely all your friends/family/neighbours will be away for the weekend and you’d have to eat it all by yourself while watching re-runs of the Great British Bake Off… Wouldn’t that be terrible?

Obviously, I’m planning on doing most of those things anyway (I mean, NO WAY I’m missing a slides and ice cream event!)… What about you? Any cool plans for the weekend?

Postcard from the Ile de Ré

Some places just feel like home. I can’t really explain how it works, but the second you set the foot there, you immediately feel calmer, happier and like everything’s just right. Ile de Ré is definitely one of those places for me.

My love story with the small Atlantic island started when I was a kid (I spent each and every one of my summers there) and it never went away.

It most probably has something to do with the pastel shades of the blinds and the bright, very pure light.

From the beautiful beaches to the lively markets, the salt marshes as far as one can see and the quirky bits here and there, there’s so much to love and there’s no place I’d rather be.

Especially if the plan includes a picnic, followed by some ice cream at La Martinière.

If you’re ever around, do yourself a favour and order a scoop (or three) of their signature salted caramel ice cream. And if you ever need any more tips on visiting this little gem f an island, let me know!

Where’s your happy place? I’d love to visit each and every one of them! 

Carrot and Almond Cake

Sunday’s cake day! Or at least, it’s one of my favourite excuses to get baking!

I’ve been back home for just a few days and I’ve spent every hour trying to find a way to use up all the vegetables we’ve goten in the garden. However, a tomato cake was hardly a possibility, so I turned to a small bunch of carrots for today’s baking experiment…

Carrot and almond cake (serves 6-8)

250g carrots, 2 big eggs, 100g sugar, 50g self-raising flour, 110g almond flour, 2.5 cL vegetable oil, pinch of salt, a handful of dry cranberries

1. Wash the carrots, peel and grate them.

2. In a big bowl, wisk the sugar and eggs together.

3. Add in the flour and almond flour and mix thoughroughly.

4. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix until thoughroughly combined.

5. Pour the batter into a buttered and floured cake tin and bake for about 35 min at 180°C.

Are you a carrot cake lover? If you have a favourite recipe, send it my way! 

Vanilla madeleines with spiced plum compote

I have all sort of obsessions. Postcards, big, snuggly scarves, notebooks… And the biggest of them all, cakes.

Add to that my most recent obsession, stone fruits, and here’s what you get: Traditional vanilla madeleines with spiced plum compote.
A treat I can garantee will become a staple in my house come Autumn. It is a bit of work (mainly because you most likely won’t cook all your madeleines in one batch) but the second I dipped my first madeleine into the still-slightly warm plum compote, I knew it was actually time perfectly spent.

For the madeleines

Ingredients: 3 eggs, 125g self-raising flour, 140g sugar, 135g butter, 5 cL milk, 2 teasp runny honey, 2 pinches sea salt, 1 vanilla pod, 1 tsp vegetable oil

1. Melt the butter and keep aside until cool

2. In a bowl, whisk the eggs with the sugar, honey, salt and vanilla seeds until it gets fluffy.

3. Add in the oil and the flour and mix thoroughly.

4. Pour in the butter and the milk and whish until thoroughly combined.

5. Cover your bowl with cling film and let it rest in the fridge for 2h.

6. Preheat your oven at 250 °C.

7. Fill the madeleine moulds with the batter (don’t over-fill them!).

8. Lower the oven temperature to 220°C and bake the madeleines for 5 min. Lower the temperature again to 200°C and cook a further 7-9 min.

For the plum compote

Ingredients: 5 purple plums, 1/2 teasp coffee spice (2/3 cinnamon, 1/3 nutmeg), 1 teasp vanilla powder, 2 tsp runny honey

1. In a small pot, cook all your ingredients until the plums are soft enough to be pureed with a fork.

2. Pour in a heat-resistant container and let it cool down a bit before serving.

Kensington stroll and night at the BBC Proms

It’s Proms season!

Actually, it’s been for quite a while, but I hadn’t managed to make my way to the fanciest of all music festivals.

Or so it was until yesterday, when I left work early and Uber-ed my way to South Kensington for an evening of classical music at the Royal Albert Hall.

Kensington stroll and night at the BBC Proms

It’s Proms season!

Actually, it’s been for quite a while, but I hadn’t managed to make my way to the fanciest of all music festivals.

Or so it was until yesterday, when I left work early and Uber-ed my way to South Kensington for an evening of classical music at the Royal Albert Hall.

Founded in 1895, The Proms is an eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical music concerts held annually in the Royal Albert Hall.

Often described as “the world’s largest and most democratic musical festival”, it’s a very civilised affair indeed; no mud or camping here; it’s all about the Champagne and classical music.
And to some extend, the queues… But well, when the best tickets in the house are only £5, I suppose it’s only fair game.

Having picked up a couple of raffle tickets, we left the Royal Albert Hall behind and raced off towards South Kensington to pick up a few bits for a little pre-concert improvised picnic. After contemplating our many options for a quite a while (and deciding that a pudding-only meal wouldn’t be reasonable despite how delicious everything in La Patisserie des Rêves‘ window looked), we settled for an old favourite: Comptoir Libanais. We picked up enough baba ganoush to feed a small army (and a few baklawas too, I simply couldn’t resist that amazing window display) and carried our feast back to the Royal Albert Hall. Soon after we returned, we were led into the Royal Albert Hall.
From then on, my jaw didn’t stop hitting the floor for the entire evening.

The architecture, the music, the company… Everything was perfect and made for one of the best nights I could ever have wished for.

For obvious reasons, I didn’t take pictures of the concert so I’m afraid you’ll have to go check it out for yourself some time soon!

Have you ever been to the BBC Proms? 

Potato & bacon salad

I don’t know about you but I always find cooking much more exausting in the summer. Maybe it’s because the idea of turning on an oven and standing in a hot kitchen for hours in the heat isn’t quite my idea of fun.

Or it could just be that ingredients are so much better in the summer that I don’t feel it’s worth doing much to them as they shine best in very simple recipes.

Baby new potatoes are one of my absolute favourite ingredients and they definitely fall into that category; they’re so much sweeter than their winter counterparts that it would be a shame to only use them as a side.

There are many ways to cook potatoes (my German friends usually brag than they know over 100), but I couldn’t think of a better way to highlight those beautiful potatoes than this deliciously light, summer-y potato and bacon salad.
Ingredients (serves 2): 500g baby new potatoes, 4 rashers streaky bacon, 3 spring onions, 1 red onion, 2 ripe tomatoes, 1 tbs whole grain mustard, 1 tbs cider vinegar, 1 tbs olive oil, 1 tbs vegetable oil, salt, black pepper.

1. Wash the potatoes and put in a pot of cold water with some salt. Boil until tender. Cut into manageable pieces.

2. Slice the spring onions, the red onion and the tomatoes.

3. Cook the bacon in a pan until nice and crispy. Take off the pan.

4. Add the sliced red onion into the pan with the bacon fat. Cook on a low temperature until soft, then turn the heat up and cook until golden.

5. Make your dressing: in a jar, combine the mustard, the olive and vegetable oil, the vinegar, some salt and black pepper. Close the lid and shake until thoughroughly mixed.

6. In a big bowl, put your sliced tomatoes. Pile on the potatoes, the bacon and red onions. Sprinkle the spring onions on top. Add a good sprinkle of salt and some cracked black pepper.

7. Pour the dressing on top and serve.

What’s your favourite way to cook potatoes? I’d love to discover new recipes I can impress my German friends with!

The Palomar

I’ve wanted to visit The Palomar ever since it opened back in April 2014. But just like another one of my recent discoveries, I’d been discouraged by the queues and hadn’t managed to get a table.

But apparently, the gods of restaurants and good food have been rather kind to me lately and as we passed by on Wednesday night and took a peek through the window, we spotted a couple of free seats.  We jumped on it and started perusing the powder pink menu… Making a choice wasn’t easy as everything looked so incredible, so it took us a while… or maybe it’s because I couldn’t take my eyes off the cooks workings their magic in the kitchen! God, I love those counter-tables restaurants!
One thing I knew I absolutely wanted to order was the Kubaneh, which is a traditional Yemenite Jewish pull-apart yeast bread. It basically the perfect cross between a brioche and a croissant and absolutely delightful. Looking back at it, I wish we had ordered more of it so we could use it to mop up all the sauces from the other dishes we got!My favourite dish that night was the Beef Tartare. Served with burnt aubergine cream, toasted almonds, pickled garlic and a tomato dressing, it wasn’t quite the traditional version I’m used too, but delicious all the same. The Aubergine & Feta Bourekas divided opinion around the table. I wasn’t so keen on them but it was my BF’s favourite, so it might just not be one for me. But you cheese-lovers around there are probably going to love it! It was totally fine though, as not being fighting for the last bits of that dish (for a change) did give me the opportunity to take a peek at that glorious cauliflower steak roasting away in the Josper Oven…… and generally enjoying the buzzy atmosphere. Everybody’s jocking around in the kitchen, signing, waving, and generally having a great time cooking, which made The Palomar the most fun restaurant I’ve ever had dinner at.I was back to business as soon as this dish was put in front of me though! It was the most delicate Seared scallops with lemon beurre blanc, swiss chard, Jerusalem artichoke and hazelnut tuile. Apparently, it’s the head chef’s favourite dish, so I knew it’d be a cracker!Another must-order is the Shakshukit, which is basically a deconstruted kebab. But this refined version has very little in common with your usual, middle-of-the-night kebab… It must be eaten to be believed!  I’m still not entirely sure what to think of the Jerusalem-style polenta. I loved the texture of the polenta, which was perfectly soft, almost like a corn-based risotto. But I wasn’t quite as excited as I thought I would be by that dish. Maybe I’m just not that much into truffle… 
We were about to implode getting quite full but the dessert menu was so perfectly named that it finished convincing us that no meal’s complite without pudding.
I’ve only heard good thing from everyone who’s had dinner at The Palomar and I’m going to join in with the fans and urge you to get in line for a table! I can garantee it’ll be worth the wait

Plus if you try the Pork tagine, please let me know how it is… I might be using that information as my excuse to go back!

The Palomar, 34 Rupert St, London W1D 6DN

Provencale Tomato and Tapenade tart

London seems to have forgotten how to Summer this year. Sure, they were a few heatwave-type days, but those were a while back, and since then, it’s been mostly dark clouds and rain and wind.

Since the weather has been failing me, I had to turn to some other methods to get my daily dose of Summer. Which might explain why I’ve baked variations of my mum’s tomato tart every week for the past month or so…
This tomato & tapenade version might be one of my favourite variations sofar.

Juicy ripe tomato, punchy tapenade and melt-in-the-mouth pastry… you’ll want a large slice of this one (and it takes minutes to put it together… #WinWin)!
Ingredients: 1 portion of shortcrust pastry (you can make your own or buy it in the supermarket), about 100g of black olive tapenade (I bought mine from the Borough Olives stall at the Borough Market), 4-6 ripe tomatoes (depending on the size of your tart tin), salt, cracked black pepper, dried thyme (or any other herb you like).

1. Roll your pastry on a lightly floured surface. Line your tart tin and cut the excess pastry.2. Spread the tapenade over the bottom of the pastry.3. Slice your tomatoes.4. Arrange the tomato slices accross the top in a circular pattern.5. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt, some cracked black pepper and a generous helping of dried thyme. 6. Bake for about 30 minutes at 180°C or until the tomatoes look golden. 7. Serve hot or cold with a green salad.

What’s your favourite lazy-cook-friendly summer recipe? 

How to wrap birthday presents? | 3 easy DIY ideas

It seems all of my friends have their birthday in August, so lately, my room has looked more like Santa’s workshop than a place dedicated to sleep and relaxation (and eating pizza in bed).

I love a well-wrapped present; it makes me almost as happy as the present itself, so I’ve spent a lot of time playing with ribbons and boxes, and searching on Pinterest for creative ideas to wrap mine.

Here are some of my current favourites.

Idea #1: Sassy card + Ribbon bowMy love for pretty stationary is no secret and this might well be my new favourite way of wrapping presents. Also, before we begin, can we take a second to appreciate how great this card is? #BestBirthdayPlanEverYou’ll need: a box (I got this one from Paperchase), a card (this brilliant little number comes from Oliver Bonas), ribbon (about 2-2.5m), some clear cellotape, scissors and a lighter. 1. Place your card on the box and secure with some clear cellotape.2. Cut the ends of your ribbon at an angle and burn them slightly with the lighter to prevent unravelling.
3. Wrap the ribbon around the box and finish by tying a bow in one of the corners. It took me a while to figure out how to place the ribbon to get the desired effect… Here’s a picture of the back of the box that should save you some time! 😜

Idea #2: Birthday candles and bowBirthday candles are a birthday celebration must-have… So why not put them on the presents as well? 
You’ll need: A box, some birthday candles (I got those letter ones from Paperchase but I reckon regular candles would look cute too!), some ribbon (the one I used came with the box!) and some clear cellotape.1. Place your candles on the box.2. Secure with cellotape.3. Add your ribbon on top of the tape.

Idea #3: Ribbon + Origami bow
This one will require a tiny bit more patience as you’ll need to fold an origami bow, but it’s definitely worth the effort as it’ll give your present a look of simple sophitication your girlfriends will love. You’ll need: a box, ribbon (about 2m), 1 sheet of origami paper, double-sided tape, scissors and a lighter.1. Cut the ends of your ribbon at an angle and burn them slightly with the lighter to prevent unravelling.
2. Fold an origami bow according to the instructions provided here. 3. Wrap the box with the ribbon. 4. Secure the origami bow with a bit of double-sided tape.

Do you like to wrap presents or is it one of your Nemesis and you’d rather have it done by someone else?